09/25/2010

Katharine Graham

Katharine Graham appeared on “Charlie Rose” on Feb. 5, 1997, to discuss her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Personal History.” Graham touched on her parents, the suicide of her husband, and her life as head of The Washington Post, particularly the paper’s release of the Pentagon Papers and its in-depth coverage of the Watergate scandal.

Graham described the pressure she was under when editor Ben Bradlee received portions of the Pentagon Papers shortly after the government had obtained a criminal injunction against The New York Times for publishing parts of it. Against the wishes of the Post’s lawyers, she decided to allow Bradlee to publish the papers.

“I felt that … the editors would really be demoralized, that the floor would be demoralized, and that a great deal depended on our doing it,” she explained. “I said, ‘Why can’t we wait a day, the Times discussed this for three months.’ And they said, ‘Because of keeping up the momentum, we gotta go. And we gotta go tonight.’ So I had about a minute to decide, so I said, ‘Go.’”